Six Palestinians killed in refugee camp blast

Six Palestinian activists in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement were killed in an explosion today at a refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus.

The blast was one of the deadliest single episodes in the 10 months of violence in the Middle East. It came only hours after a tense confrontation between Israeli police and Palestinians at Jerusalem's most contested religious shrine.

The blast blew the roof off the home at a refugee camp north of Nablus. Palestinians said the explosion was part of Israel's policy of targeting suspected Palestinian paramilitaries.

"The Israeli government continues its policy of assassination," said the Palestinian cabinet secretary, Ahmed Abdel Rahman. "This policy will destroy any hope for peace. Resistance will continue."

Israel said it was checking the circumstances of the explosion. In some similar cases in the past, Israel has described explosions as "work accidents," a euphemism for Palestinian bombs that exploded prematurely.

The force of the blast blew the roof off the home, suggesting that the explosion came from inside the structure, which was a car parts store.

Palestinian witnesses said they did not hear helicopters or tank guns - signals of earlier Israeli attacks.

Palestinian Mansour Barahmah said he was sleeping when he heard a powerful explosion early today. "I went there immediately and found a fire," he said. "The bodies were still burning."

The bodies were dismembered by the explosion, and some body parts were tossed 30 metres from a table where the men apparently had been sitting, he said.

All six of the dead were members of Fatah, the movement headed by Mr Arafat, the Palestinian leader. At least three were among the dozens of suspected militants sought by the Israelis, according to Mahmoud al-Aloul, the governor of Nablus.

The men, aged 22 to 31, regularly slept in the shack, fearing the Israelis would attack them in their homes, Palestinian witnesses said. A seventh man in the shack was wounded, they added.

The explosion followed a tense day yesterday. In Jerusalem, Palestinians rained stones on Jewish worshippers commemorating a holy day at the Western Wall, prompting Israeli police to storm the Al Aqsa Mosque compound and drive back the crowd with stun grenades.

Yesterday's clash came exactly 10 months after the current round of Mideast violence erupted inside the same hilltop compound where two large mosques were built atop the ruins of the biblical Jewish temples.

Israeli police blocked a group of about 30 hardline Jewish nationalists, the Temple Mount Faithful, from placing the symbolic cornerstone of a new temple within the mosque compound. The police permitted the group to hold a short ceremony in a parking lot outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.

Shortly after, Muslims inside the compound began throwing stones, bricks and bottles at hundreds of Jews praying down below at the Western Wall, which forms an exterior wall of the compound.

When the stone-throwing began, about 400 Israeli police in riot gear rushed inside the mosque compound. The police were met with a hail of rocks, and tossed stun grenades.

Fifteen Israeli policemen and 10 Palestinians were injured and 28 Palestinians were arrested.

Israel claims sovereignty over the compound, which Jews call the Temple Mount. However, the Waqf, an Islamic trust, has day-to-day control over what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary.

The first clashes in the current violence broke out at the site on September 29 - the day after a controversial visit by Ariel Sharon, now Israel's prime minister.

Since then, 539 Palestinians and 133 Israelis have died in the fighting.